Quote

Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.

George Santayana

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George Santayana
Age: 88 †
Born: 1863
Born: October 2
Died: 1952
Died: September 16
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Madrid
Spain
Jorge Santayana
Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana
Jorge Augustin Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana
George Santayana
Action
Beard
Long
Beware
Men
Arguments
Quick
Steady
Argument
Hesitates
Speech
Beards
Trust
Brevity

More quotes by George Santayana

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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
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Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
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why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
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A friend's only gift is himself.
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The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
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If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
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Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
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Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
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With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
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The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
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What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.
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Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
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Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.
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There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
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